


Chasmonautica

by kiwiya



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: (in the pendleton chapter), F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Multi, Sibling Incest, you guys played the game you know what happens in high chaos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 05:27:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1077065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiwiya/pseuds/kiwiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>((A whole bunch of really short Dishonored pieces. Every chapter is whatever I have for a particular ship or whatever gen I have about a particular character. A lot of it is just really tame pwp.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. -- corvo/daud

 

Daud is human.

It takes Corvo three weeks to realize this (three weeks with him always _around,_ with him _where she lived_ , defiling the place with his very presence, three weeks with Corvo’s teeth grinding and his fingernails digging into his palms, three weeks with a new _spymaster_ ). Daud keeps to himself, no one ever sees him, like some kind of fucking ghost. Corvo isn’t even sure where he sleeps.

And then one day he’s in the library (the study? her study); there’s a fire going, and for the first time in all the many times Corvo’s seen him, he isn’t wearing that filthy red coat. It’s tossed over the back of the armchair Daud sits in, an open book and a spread deck of cards on the table, and his head resting lightly on his hands. His hackles rise, of course - Corvo was only ever able to sneak up on him once.

Daud is wearing a loose brown sweater and a grey vest, unbuttoned only at the collar. He closes his eyes. The thing Corvo feels is the void swallowing the sky - a heart tells him there is no hope anymore.

This time, the heart is his own.

 

(The thing Corvo feels is love.)

 


	2. -- corvo + others, gen

 

Corvo attends three funerals in the span of a week.

He weeps openly, and marvels at how fitting it is that men cry tears of brine.

 

\--

 

His coat is too big for his frame and his hair is dripping wet. It has never been dry. His eyes are (among the other things - deep, endless, black) always trained with intense curiosity. He means it when he tells Corvo he is not all things.

He is not a man.

 

\--

 

They tell him it will be a struggle, a sacrifice, but Corvo is willing to give up all the little he still has - the shirt on his back and the tattered skin beneath it too. Night after night, he leaps from the fire back into to the pan, bleeding out in the bar for them (and her, for her). He is prepared to bleed as much as it takes.

He is still floored (and how literally!) when, sick and starving, they leap upon him and wet their lying tongues. They drink deep. They drink gallons.

(Corvo cannot sleep at night for the deafening hissing of vipers.)

 

-

 

Corvo spits in Pendleton’s face, rips his shirts off while he’s still wheezing his last breath on insults, and binds his wound with them, in the rain, blood and water and bright red elixir soaking them both.

Corvo returns the Pendletons’ stolen portrait not that many days later. It is worth thousands, he writes. (Enough to stay fed, at least.) Treavor is nauseated by the very sight of the thing and he sells it immediately, for half its value.

It is a great scandal and a slight to the aristocracy when the Lord Pendleton is not invited to the new Empress' coronation. Corvo never looks him in the eye again.

(He wishes he had died.)

 

\--

 

One person dies on Lady Emily Kaldwin’s path to the throne - only one - and his death is not for her, anyway. There will be no murders in Emily’s name; the Lord Protector swears it to them both. So when Hiram Burrows dies, it is by Corvo’s hand only, for Corvo’s resolution. He dies because Corvo cannot live if he doesn’t.

But he didn’t expect it to feel so..

His hands hold a slender figure, fallen limp, blood soaking through finely tailored clothes and blooming on the stone floor around them. The wind howls. He dies wheezing Corvo’s name. This has happened before, this is not satisfying, and _this has happened before -_ Corvo is very nearly sick with realization. He drops the body and leans back, into the Void, flickering away across tower walls before the guards even have a clear shot at him.

Corvo doesn’t sleep for days. Food tastes like ash in his mouth. He feels blood on his hands no matter how many times he scrubs them; the real blood will not wash entirely out of his shirt. Over and over he hears a last breath, nothing like he imagined it would be - he didn’t deserve this. He, Corvo, _does not deserve this_.

(None of them deserve this.)

Corvo closes his eyes and he wishes, and he wishes, and he wishes.

This is why, days later, he lies on his back unnoticed atop a light fixture, midday sunlight filtering in through the thick glass of the roof, a crossbow gripped white-knuckled to his chest, and says just louder than a whisper, “Please don’t drink that.”

 

\--

  


When Corvo hears the first gunshot, he thinks: “I have failed.” Pendleton’s blood stains the floor until they have all the stones replaced.

At the second gunshot, Corvo knows he has failed. There are bits of Teague Martin on his mask, on the little exposed parts of his face. It’s no different than when he was alive.

The third shot is Corvo’s own. He thought he’d set a very clear line. It was crossed.

(Emily’s outfit will never wash white again. Long after she’s a grown and powerful woman, she’ll still remember the sticky feeling of the admiral’s blood in her hair.)

 

\--

 

Corvo passes on to the Void a few years before, but Emily lives to see the day the last whale dies.

Or, rather, she does not.

 

 


	3. -- corvo/martin

 

Teague Martin has “poor circulation,” he says, and even in a overseer’s ( _ex_ -overseer’s) heavy coat, Dunwall at winter is no place for the cold-blooded. Corvo pries open the stocks and pulls him to his feet, checks his neck quickly for bruising, touches a hand to his arm. Holds it there. Martin makes some clever, biting remark, but there’s no cruelty to it - a mask, no different than Corvo’s, for hiding behind an ever-steady voice not his face but his trembling hands, the way he stumbles a little when he starts to walk, the redness in and around his eyes. Corvo doesn’t yet know this man, but it won’t be long before he does. He removes his long overcoat (it’s cumbersome, why did he even bring it?) and wraps it around Martin, over his clergyman’s costume, taking special care to pull it more snug and hold onto his shoulders just a bit longer than is really necessary.

 

\--

 

Corvo tops Martin - slowly, gently, Martin’s not fragile and he’s not a stranger to this but he’s been chaste a for long time and sometimes he still feels a little clergyman's guilt at what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s just nicer not to hurry. He comes quietly; Corvo embraces him. It’s not anything like Martin remembers, but he’s pretty sure he prefers it to any way he’s had it before.

 


	4. -- corvo/everyone

 

When Corvo beds the Lord Pendleton, he’s surprised to find that his body is nothing like a nobleman’s ought to be; far from unblemished, there is pronounced scarring over his knees and elbows, and there are enough little round burns (from matches? cigarettes?) scattered across his belly and running down his thighs that they probably could be mistaken for some kind of pox. He mumbles and fidgets about as he’s being undressed, but stills when Corvo places a hand on his side, and stares up with wide eyes and an unreadable expression when Corvo’s hand traces the major scar there - ugly, deep and fresh, it’s as round as the bullet that left it.

It’s harder than one would expect to convince Teague Martin to take his shirt off - but the reason is readily apparent when he does. A smattering of old, pale scars dust his entire torso, and the white, gnarled memory of a deep gash snakes from his navel all the way across to his left hip. Corvo doesn’t see it at first, but his back, too, is tattered everywhere with the wear of years and years of the Everyman's lashings. The freshest marks are the most pronounced, some still with long, thin scabs, tight and pink around the edges. His skin prickles visibly in the cold air and he grumbles something like “I won’t have you staring at me” before he pulls an undershirt back on. With no amount of pleading is Corvo able to convince him to take it off again.

Havelock, truth be told, might be the cleanest of them all. The whipping scars on his back are few, and clearly from his youth in the navy. He doesn’t frown or flinch when Corvo touches them; if anything, they’re a source of pride. One of his feet was apparently once torn open, all along the inside edge - the sort of wound one would accrue from stepping on coral - but the wound has long since healed and he doesn’t walk with any kind of limp anymore. His skin is thick and weathered everywhere, burnt leathery by the sun, and his muscles are remarkably hard underneath. He smiles when Corvo examines him. There are no fresh wounds on the admiral.

Cecelia is thin, very much thinner than she seems with all her men’s clothing on. Corvo can count her ribs. Her skin is pale, too, and he is actually filled with concern at how taut and dry it feels. Her hands are red and cracked; they bleed if she flexes them too quickly. She won’t let him hold them, but she smiles whenever he tries.

Corvo can see without asking that Lydia has never starved, but her hands are so thick and calloused, he could easily have mistaken them for a heavy laboring man’s. She isn’t ashamed to touch him with them, and Corvo finds a lot more enjoyment in that than he expected he would.

Wallace is no less leathery than any of the others, and why should he be? There are no noticeable scars anywhere on his body; he has not been beaten in a very long time. He wants to sit - he admits after some prying - because his feet hurt, and not lie down, because his back and shoulders pain him nightly. He is solid to the touch, but remarkably pliable. Wallace seems not to care about a great many things, and the state of his body is one of them.

Piero is soft and almost totally unscarred - but how thin the man is! He’s not a skeleton, not like Cecelia, but Corvo had no idea how hard times must have been until he finds he can wrap an arm around nearly Piero’s entire midsection, and one hand entirely around his forearm. His fingers are calloused and his hands are bandaged, scarred and charred, and worn all over like no hands Corvo has ever seen before, or likely will ever see again.

Sokolov doesn’t much resemble his counterpart. He is tan and hairy, thick-skinned, and very well fed, to speak politely of his paunchy midsection. Nowhere is he scarred, and nowhere does he seem ever to have suffered, except on his hands - which are not cut or calloused, but bear the marks of a lifetime of small electrical burns. He is incredibly deft with them; Corvo tips back his head in ecstasy and knows he should’ve expected no less.

Corvo asks nothing of Callista, and out of all them, she is the one who would be relieved by that. She offers him nothing back, either. They smile and exchange words in the hallway. It’s pleasant. Nothing much changes.

Samuel the boatman simply refuses to undress. Corvo immediately feels ashamed for asking, and tries fiercely to leave, despite a sudden slew of reassurances. Samuel kisses him, in the end, but his hands stay gloved and his coat stays on - and Corvo doesn’t look at anything.

 

 


	5. -- daud, gen

 

When Daud is a little boy, just taller than his mother’s knee, she sits in the sand somewhere along the warm Serkonan coast and holds him in her lap, surrounded, for the moment, by the stars and the waves and the jungle, and very little else. She kisses his small head and wraps her hands around his, and sings to him, that he will be a strong man one day.

After the Empress dies, he holds his payment in shaking hands, and does not feel very strong at all.

 

\--

 

Seventy years prior, on the northernmost tip of Serkonos, two young men (but not so young), friends since birth, cheer and lock in an embrace - each being asked to hold a position of honor at the wedding of the other. They make plans and bring up old stories and reflect on their blessed lives. They swear by the sea that their families will be inseparable from then on. One of them cries.

The first man falls ill and dies while his son is still too young to walk. His bereaved friend does everything he can, but the boy grows up troubled and alone. He leaves his mother and takes to the sea as soon as he’s strong enough to be worth the wages. They suspect he’s gone with pirates. They’re right. He dies unceremoniously on some distant shore, decades before his mother, who will never know about the powerful witch who killed him, or his son she carried.

The second man has an exceptionally beautiful daughter, who grows up with soft hands and marries a kind lumber worker, beloved by the town. He dies before the birth of his son, the only small light that would remain in her life. She starves. He enlists, not fast enough to save her. But the pay is decent and there's nothing left of his home, so the son stays, burdened always by his failure. Haunted by weakness. Tempted by love.

In the present moment, two men stand with their swords locked, and a great deal of talk between them about magic and death and regret. One will live to see his daughter on a throne. The other will spend long nights rubbing at a phantom slash across his throat and contemplating the nature of his own demise. And when he is invited, he too will come see the girl crowned.

No one will ever realize how important it is, however many decades later, that these men depart the world as something resembling friends.

(No one, save their curious black-eyed benefactor.)

 


	6. -- corvo + outsider, gen (more)

 

In one dream, Corvo finds himself lying on his back, as if still asleep, paralyzed and staring up at miles of ocean above him. If he tries, he thinks can only just see the surface, in the occasional flicker of light far beyond his reach. And he knows, with a dreaming man’s certainty, that it is up there.

The Outsider explained to Corvo once, in his way, that whales can see colors men can't. That there are shapes you can't draw. That the form he takes is not his true or only one. Corvo suspected as much. He was just never inquisitive enough to ask a question he knew he wouldn’t understand the answer to. The Outsider knew this too, probably, but he still seemed angered by the disinterest.

"He was more curious than you. This body I’m using. To keep from tearing you apart."

(Always mindful of power.)

"…Is that how you got a hold of him, then?"

"When you go looking for answers, you have to be ready for what you find."

"The only thing he looks is drowned."

Then silence. In Corvo’s dream, he can still see the surface, but now he knows in his dreamer’s heart that it’s no longer there.

"His name was Douglas."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ((props if you read all the game notes))


	7. -- corvo/samuel

 

Corvo kisses Samuel for the first time while they are in his boat. He kisses him with soft intensity, hands gripping his upper arms, pressing him down, down against the seat, and it is Samuel who breaks away panting for air. He’s overwhelmed by the heat in Corvo’s eyes, his touch, but he’s not that spry and he’s not as sturdy as he once took pride in being; the seat digs into his hip and his knees cry in protest at this ungainly position; Samuel all but whimpers. Without a word, without ever breaking his gaze, Corvo sweeps the boatman up into his arms, and then they are ashore, and Samuel is carried like a bride to the one real bed he can very easily lie in, by a pair of arms he has gotten very used to relying _on_.

 


	8. -- martin/pendleton

 

Martin does not take the upper hand; he forces others to give it to him. He is a strategist, and his moves are as deliberate when he lays routes out on a map as when he lays his fingers out on the nobleman, once on his shoulder, his arm, a small circle on his back, brush their hands together with calculated frequency, too many times for it to be accidental and not often enough for it to be on purpose. Pendleton takes notice. This is a game and Martin is a winner. The same silver tongue that will lay out a man’s crimes before him and name the price (bondage to its cause), drops small and genuine compliments that are quiet shots to the heart, and bind a man to Martin exactly as he knew they would - his tongue bends the overseers to his will and it bends the Lord Pendleton quite literally towards him, hanging on his words like the starved child he is, and trying to act as though he doesn’t constantly stare (at his lips, at his throat). Teague is self-made, his words have stolen for him everything he has; he comes from nothing and there is deep satisfaction having this kind of power over the high and landed; he knows he makes Treavor ache when he wants to (all the time), sees it in his eyes (all the time), and feels it in every fumbling touch the lord tries stupidly to return. When Pendleton is finally in his mouth, spindly fingers in his hair, he squeals and sighs and there is nothing left resembling nobility. The power is with Martin, completely, and this knowledge brings him over the edge all on its own.

 


	9. -- corvo/martin/havelock/pendleton

 

Havelock takes Corvo bent over on the bed - he is not gentle, but at Corvo’s insistence, he is slow. Martin undresses kneeling on the bed, with Corvo’s eyes on him the whole time. He is uncomfortable. Corvo helps him with the buckles on his cloak, and takes him in his mouth. Pendleton is left on the side - as usual. Corvo, through all of it, makes sure to touch him, so he will not feel left out. He always feels left out.

Later Corvo will thank the admiral and kiss his neck. He will hold the overseer and kiss his lips. And he will come to the nobleman alone, take his hands, and kiss him anywhere he wants.

 


	10. -- pendleton/custis + morgan

 

In the Lord Pendleton’s dreams, he is with his brothers, but they are not really his brothers. They are a warmth behind him and in front of him, wrapped around him like a snake and not at all like two bookends, one thing with two backs - but not beastly here - that holds him and fondles him and kisses him like he knows they kiss each other. Sometimes they talk about pleasant things, sometimes they do not. Always, they press against him from both sides and touch him, in the way they are constantly touching, in a way he has never actually been touched.

He whimpers into the pillow in the night and wakes up harder than he was when he fell asleep - no longer ringed by empty glasses, but loathing himself all the same. They do not love him.

 


End file.
